


No Strings Attached

by Elster



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fae & Fairies, Fairy Tales, Gen, Love Confessions, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-24
Updated: 2012-02-24
Packaged: 2017-10-31 16:55:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/346358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elster/pseuds/Elster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To save John from being spirited away Under the Hill, Sherlock challenges the fairy queen to a fiddle contest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Strings Attached

**Author's Note:**

> Based on "The Fairy Queen" by Heather Alexander  
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DJVRZY1CF8
> 
> Written for this prompt: http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/16422.html?thread=93009958#t93009958

Sherlock stops looking for traces of the missing persons when it gets too dark to see properly. A steady breeze drives the cold drizzle that surrounds him into the fabric of his clothes, chilling him to the bone, but he doesn't feel it, too distracted and disconcerted is he by his own lack of success. 

There have to be footprints, signs of struggle, lost possessions. Something. It's not possible that these people simply vanished into the fine mist and dark soil of the moor. 

He gets up from a crouch and lets his gaze slide over a landscape that is rapidly drained of its colours and filling with shadows as the sun sinks behind clouds that seem to become more solid by the minute. The yellow lights of the nearest houses blink through the shivering leaves of a group of elderberry bushes. Sherlock knows it seems closer than it is; a good thirty minutes walk will bring him to the edge of the village, the bed and breakfast they're staying at just a little bit further down the road. 

He starts moving towards it. Nothing to be gained here and even if there was he didn't take a torch with him and doesn't know the terrain well enough to cross it in complete darkness. 

The failure of his search rankles. He didn't expect to find something specific – always a mistake to do so – but he expected to find something. People don't vanish without trace. What does it mean if there are no traces? No obvious signs of the kidnapper(s) trying to cover their tracks. The weather has been bad, but the latest case is very recent and there have been the occasional footprints on the moor, just nothing conclusively connected to the case. It's maddening.

He will have to approach the solution of the case from another angle. Sherlock resigns himself to spending a large part of the evening with John retelling the tales of ludicrous superstition he doubtlessly heard from the locals since he last saw Sherlock. 

It will be over a pint in the pub and there will be food, no matter what Sherlock has to say about it. John will tell Sherlock fairy tales as if he didn't have to listen to enough already before he starts relaying the relevant information – unreliable witness statements and John's own, slightly more apt observations – that will still be vital to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the disappearances. 

It's the kind of subtle ribbing John specialises in to get back at Sherlock for incidents that can't be of any importance since Sherlock continuously chooses to delete them. Coming from anyone else Sherlock would think this deliberate trying of his patience pointless and passive-aggressive, but coming from John it is tolerable. 

Sherlock thinks about how the local lore could be relevant to the modus operandi of the kidnapper(s) when he hears baying hounds and the trample of running horses on soft ground. The sound seems far away one moment and startlingly close the next, when the wind suddenly stills and leaves an unnatural quiet behind. 

Bemused by the phenomenon Sherlock turns around to find the source of it, but there is empty darkening land as far as he can see. It's decidedly odd, the way he suddenly feels the chill tingling in his fingertips and the way his wet hair sticks to his skin in the now gentle rain. There's a primal need to run that radiates from his stomach and evaporates from the back of his neck. 

He notes the quickening of his breath with detached interest, while he stands and waits for the sounds he heard to recur, for something to arrive or for the quiet to revert. He's caught frozen between this trembling fear and his burning curiosity. He doesn't understand. It is brilliant.

When the hunt arrives Sherlock waited long enough to discard any possible explanation. It leaves him with the impossible and still he can't deny being surprised. 

There was no way he could have imagined the dazzling glimmer of it; the hunters, their hounds and horses, the birds of pray carried on raised arms, move in erratic yet fluent movements, blurred as if their shapes have to be bend by his brain into recognizable forms, made to look like a hunting party because that's what they are, even if their actual appearance might me entirely dissimilar. 

It's an interpretation of the inconceivable based on its purpose rather than its recognisability. Or Sherlock might just be loosing his mind.

They give no sign of noticing his presence and so he stays rooted to his spot, watching, observing. It's hard to avert his gaze from them, distracted as he is by their surreal strangeness and so he doesn't see John until almost half of them have passed him. 

His friend appears to be sleeping, half sitting, half lying on the back of one of the horses, held in place by the slender, unyielding arms (twines?) of a thing that looks a bit like a woman. 

The sight of John jolts Sherlock from his petrified state. It gives the scene a sense of reality it didn't previously possess. Sherlock wouldn't dream John into this vision, he's reasonably sure. And even in a dream they wouldn't be allowed to take him away like this. 

The thought of John's stolid practicality and calm insanity enthralled into this acid trip kindles a cold anger in Sherlock. It's not right.

He cannot hear through the sudden roaring of blood in his ears, but must have shouted something because the hunt comes to a halt. All eyes focus on him in perfect stillness. It's disconcerting, Sherlock might be starting to understand why people don't like him to look at them if being looked at can feel like this. He can't make himself meet their eyes.

“You can't take him away. Give him back!” Sherlock points at John, not sure if they can understand him, uncomfortably aware that he sounds childish, as if John was a thing that belonged to him.

They don't move, don't give a sign of comprehension, until one of the riders – obviously the leader of the group – comes forward. She's brilliant and cold like the moon. Sherlock is impervious to her inhuman beauty, but not to her voice. It's a voice like spun glass, the highest trembling note held on his violin, pure and heartbreaking. Literally: his heart skips a beat when she asks: “Why would I let go what I rightfully captured?” 

“He's my friend,” Sherlock answers.

The queen's face is unmoving like carved marble, but something about her gaze is mocking. “Human hearts are as plentiful as they are fickle. You will find another.”

“I won't,” Sherlock contradicts with conviction. It's perfectly obvious. She doesn't know the first thing of John's heart if she calls it fickle. His temper may be, but his heart is steady.

She listens to his words – spoken and unspoken alike – with impatient dismay, before she asks: “You believe to know the heart of this mortal toy?”

“I do,” Sherlock says, bristling at the casual slander.

“And you believe to hold it?”

“I do,” Sherlock repeats stubbornly.

“And you believe this heart to be true?”

“I know it to be true,” Sherlock replies through gritted teeth. How many pointless questions is she going to ask? 

“And is he sworn to you by word or blood?”

“He is,” Sherlock answers. He despises this archaic jabbering. As if a shot that perfect was in need of this kind of romanticised paraphrasing.

She falls silent for endless seconds, contemplating. At last she speaks: “We recognise your claim. You shall be given opportunity to win back your knight. You play the fiddle, so we will play to his heart and will let it decide. Do you accept?”

There is no real choice, so Sherlock nods. “As you can see I don't have my instrument with me at the moment...”

“Luthier will lend you one of his own,” she says and one of the group descends from his horse and searches his bags to finally, with visible reluctance, offer Sherlock a bow and a crooked fiddle made from pale mud-grey wood. 

Sherlock takes them and coaxes a few notes out of the instrument. Despite it's odd appearance its sound is marvellous, easily better than that of Sherlock's own. “Thank you,” Sherlock says.

The queen nods. She has her own instrument, black as raven feathers and smoothed to a velvet shine, the silver strings gleaming even in the weak light of dusk. 

She begins to play without further ado. Her play is flawless and hauntingly beautiful. Strange melodies like ice crystals, like rippling waves on water. It enchants her followers just as much as it does Sherlock. It enchants John even trapped as he is in dreams, draws him more firmly into their net, spun from the human longing for immortality. 

Sherlock is aware that he won't be able to surpass her skill, but he knew that from the start. No, the way to meet this challenge is not vainly trying to be better than her. He must play to reach John, reach his heart and trust it to be true. 

He has no idea how he is supposed to do so. It is one thing to bluff his way into this challenge, another entirely to succeed. What would he have to convey to wake John from this sleep? There is no easy answer to this question. 

Sherlock doesn't know what it was that made John take to him, what it is that makes him stay. He's not in the habit of thinking about other people's motivations, but now he needs an answer. It is disturbing that anything should be this vital.

The Queen stops before long. Her face shows a smile or maybe a smirk, it's too faint an expression and her features too outlandish to tell with certainty. Sherlock lifts his bow and touches it to the string. 

His first note quivers in the air, deep and slow and full of doubt. How can you speak to a heart when you have none of your own? 

Sherlock looks at John's face, still holding that tone and thinks it unfair that John had chosen a friend like him, a disappointment and a failure. Brilliant, sure, but ultimately doomed to let John down. If he wasn't such a self-absorbed, mercurial-

His finger slips on the string and the note cuts off. There's sweat on his fingers, a deafening drumming in his veins. He does have a heart after all and he does care. He can't lose John. It's time to stop the bravado and try being brave. 

Sherlock's next tone is clear and steady and the one after that is better still, a triad of returning self-assurance. And then he plays. He doesn't think about it, he just plays and thinks of John who listens to him. Who will come back to him as surely as the tide comes back to the shore, because he doesn't care for immortality and he doesn't long for perfection. 

Sherlock's melody becomes faster, sliding over the scales in chaotic, dissonant pattern, held together only by the rhythm that echoes the beat of Sherlock's heart. 

It's nowhere near perfect, not even beautiful. It contains noises that John complained of after hours of endless repetition and themes reminiscent of the insipid songs John hums under the shower. Sherlock thinks of bickering over tea about the correct way to archive case files – by date, dust or alphabetic order – and John being so irritatingly, unswervingly sensible. 

He thinks of a string of lovers, one more forgettable than the next, none staying longer than necessary to realise that they will never be able to compete. He thinks of danger and excitement and shared looks of morbid humour.

Sherlock hopes for it to last and lets this hope bleed into sound. It's the most courageous he's ever been. He hopes for it to last, for John to be right about whatever he sees in Sherlock, for John to stay with him through rows and rooftop chases and rainy afternoons. 

The melody turns softer, more harmonic, more solemn. There doesn't have to be a reason to do so, other than Sherlock being brilliant and John being marvellous. And if there has to be, then they will find it.

Sherlock ends on a tritone, just to be difficult. When he looks up at John's face again his eyes are open and looking at him in bemusement.

John opens his mouth, closes it again. “That was... wow!” He blinks. “Actually, that was awful. But... well...” He looks around, taking in the hunt with his own special brand of stoic bewilderment. “Do I want to know?”

Sherlock ignores John's idle question and turns to the queen, his look hard, his stance defiant.

The queen might seem a little less composed than before, it is hard to be sure with a creature that seems to be made of watery moonlight. “Your human knight is free to leave with you. All my skill can not compare to love. It spins its own magic,” she says and maybe Sherlock just imagines the hint of disgruntlement in her voice.

John half climbs, half falls off the horse – no help from the plant-woman there – and sides with Sherlock. “God, you're smug,” he says in a grumpy tone that doesn't fool Sherlock at all. “Do you own my soul now or something?”

“Don't be silly.” Sherlock answers dismissively before he seeks out the luthier to return the fiddle. When he wants to give it to him, he shakes his head.

Sherlock narrows his eyes. “A gift?” he asks suspiciously.

The luthier nods. 

It is very tempting; to own an instrument like this. “No strings attached?” Sherlock asks.

The luthier smiles, which is not an assuring sight by any definition. 

“Sherlock, don't,” John says nervously.

Sherlock loosens the fiddle's strings, one after the other and removes them. He gives them to the luthier in a carefully rolled bundle and keeps the body. 

“No strings attached,” he calls to John, who smiles back at him with fond exasperation. “A very generous gift, I'll cherish it,” he assures the luthier, who bows the head and doesn't seem to take it too badly.

“We will depart now,” the queen says, “before we find ourselves stripped of all belongings.”

Sherlock bows low. “Farewell, your majesty and hunters.”

“Farewell, changeling-child, human knight,” she answers, her last words already fading in the returning gale as the wild hunt disappears.

John, who is fuzzing with his coat, falls in step beside Sherlock as they start their way back to the village. “What did she call you?” he asks, even though Sherlock knows that John knows that Sherlock knows that John understood her parting-words perfectly well. It's just John's style to ask bland questions in an unassuming manner while fully aware that he's being currish.

Sherlock shrugs. “Must be the French part of my family, they always said it was art in the blood. Well, what do you know?”

“If I write about this, no one is going to believe me.”

“Most of your readers don't believe you now. I'd just appreciate it if you could refrain from bad puns for once. What are you doing there?”

“I'm turning my coat, so to speak.”

“Do you really think they are bothered by fashion statements?”

“Can't hurt.”

“It looks stupid. And they're not likely to come back right now.”

“Sherlock, just let me be paranoid, okay?”

They walk quietly side by side for a few minutes, before John says. “I just wanted to- That thing there. Well. I have no idea what it was you did, but anyway... Pretty bloody amazing.”

“You said it was awful.”

“I did, didn't I? Hm. Never one without the other with you, is it?”

“You're welcome.” 

John laughs, short and startled, then changes the topic. “I think I deserve a pint now. And food.”

Sherlock groans. “How do you deserve it? You got yourself kidnapped.”

“Got you a fiddle, though.”

“I refuse to talk to you.”

“Very eloquently.”

“Shut up.”

John does. And if his hand happens to brush against Sherlock's for an instant now and then as they walk side by side, it is purely by accident.


End file.
